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‘SNL’ and Alec Baldwin take on Trump’s border security emergency

Posted at 4:25 PM, Feb 17, 2019
and last updated 2019-02-17 19:25:58-05

“Saturday Night Live” enlisted Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump to deride the president’s declaration of national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I’m here to declare a very urgent, important national emergency,” he said. “This is a big one so I don’t want to waste any time. I just had a great health exam. I’m still standing 6 foot 7, 185 pounds. Shredded.”

“We need wall, okay,” he added, sounding a little bit like Tonto, Tarzan and Frankenstein. “Wall works. Wall makes safe. … Abuelasand bebes unless you give me wall.”

“You can all see why I gotta fake this national emergency right,” he continued. “Drugs are coming through this country through no wall.”

During a question-and-answer session with the president, CNN’s Jim Acosta, played by Kyle Mooney, said statistics show that undocumented immigrants commit less crime than Americans.

“Those numbers are faker than this emergency,” Trump said.

The president continued. “This is a total emergency, a five-alarm blaze,” he said, “which means I gotta go to Mar-a-Lago so I can play some golf.”

Trump also introduced his new attorney general, William Barr (Beck Bennett): “He’s working for me so I give him three months, OK. Dead man walking right there.”

On the news segment “Weekend Update,” co-hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che unleashed more jokes about the emergency declaration.

Jost noted the meandering nature of Trump’s announcement Friday at the White House Rose Garden.

“To demonstrate how bad the drug problem is Trump spent 20 minutes doing his impression of a coke addict,” he said.

“This wall is clearly racist,” Che said later. “It’s just a way for middle America to blame brown people on their new heroin problem.”

Jost said that Trump’s mottos in support of building a new border barrier are evolving from “Build the wall,” to “Finish the wall,” to, “Actually the wall was inside of us the whole the time.”

Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi (Kate McKinnon) and Chuck Schumer (Alex Moffat) appeared on “Weekend Update” so they could avoid gloating over Trump’s defeat on border wall funding.

They joked that he received only 2.3 percent of the money he wanted for his wall.

“I can’t drink milk that rich, sir,” Schumer said, referring to the percentage. “I’d explode.”

Don Cheadle, star of Showtime’s “Black Monday,” hosted, and Grammy Award winner Gary Clark Jr. was the musical guest.